The Field Guide › Article
A guest post from safety specialist Robert Slocomb (writing from the US water/wastewater construction industry) on why good lead-men often decline to step up to foreman. The reasons are structural rather than personal: foremen are 'time poor', working unpaid overtime and giving up family time, while leads control their own overtime; good leads have job security and don't get fired, whereas foremen, managers and directors are dismissed for the smallest offence; and most damagingly, foremen get blamed for every injury affecting their crew — the quickest resolution for 'time poor' managers — making the role thankless and prone to being dumped on. Slocomb diagnoses the root as a lack of unity between field and management: there should be one team and one purpose, but there are two. His proposed remedy is a 'trinity business' of three equal, mutually respectful parts — Production, Quality Control, and Safety — bound together by psychological safety as the glue. The piece is grounded in the lived reality of construction sites and the one-second, physiologically-driven calculations workers make under pressure, and frames psychological safety as attractive precisely because it engages with how people actually think and function.